Does watching gun sports increase gun sales?
Gun sales in the U.S. can be driven by a variety of factors and events--was the 2024 Olympics one of them?
Today we are joined by Cailyn Kim, a high school student interested in natural experiments who worked with us this past summer. With the 2024 Paris Olympics dominating the news, highly meme-able photos of Olympic pistol shooters gave her an idea, which she investigated for today’s newsletter.
The 2024 Paris Olympics hosted approximately 40 sports, with gymnastics, track, and swimming all in close competition for “most watched,” attracting over 30 million U.S. viewers—an 82% increase from the 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympics. With today’s video streaming capabilities, viewers could pick and choose which sport to view from the 5,000 hours of coverage. This year, it was easier than ever to discover a new sport that Olympic enthusiasts could find so intriguing that they might be inspired to try it themselves.
Three Olympic sports this year involved guns: riflery, pistol shooting, and shotgun. Silver medalist shooters Yeji Kim from South Korea and Yusuf Dikeç from Turkey popularized their sport by going viral on social media, reaching an even larger audience beyond the their events’ reported viewership.
Kim gained attention for her swagger and eyewear, described by an NPR reporter as “cyborg-esque shooting glasses and casual-yet-confident stance,” which ultimately landed her an acting gig as an assassin.

Meanwhile in the men’s competition, it was the absence of fancy equipment combined with his laid back, hand-casually-in-pocket “nonchalant stance” that led Dikeç to capture the fascination of fellow athletes and fans around the world.

Even if you weren’t an avid Olympic viewer this summer, chances are that you’ve seen images of these two somewhere, as they quickly spread across traditional and social media. And while it would be hard to study this single Olympic season we wondered: if we looked at a bunch of summer Olympics, would there be evidence that the sudden attention on gun sports lead gun sales to shoot through the roof?
Is it even plausible that the Olympics could drive gun sales?
There are a number of factors that research suggests drive gun sales. Most nationwide research on gun sales relies not on actual sales data, but on data generated when a firearms dealer conducts a background check on a prospective buyer. The FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System, or NICS, releases the number of background checks initiated for various types of firearm sales from licensed firearms dealers. Notably, some private sales do not require background checks depending on local laws, but NICS background checks generally serve as a pretty good proxy for actual gun sales.
Gun sales tend to be seasonal, picking up in the fall and winter around hunting season and the holidays. But as far as other events that drive sales, prior research has demonstrated increases in NICS background checks to buy guns following elections, mass shootings, protests, and passage of firearm regulations. So while there is evidence that current events can influence gun sales, these events have generally been ones that spur anxiety about personal safety and/or future restrictions on gun sales.
Our question was a bit different: could an event that might generate new interest in gun sports translate into a measurable increase in gun sales? If the Olympics are randomly timed with respect to interest in firearms, we have a natural experiment on our hands. We can compare gun sales in the months following the summer Olympics to those same times in years without summer Olympics. If there’s a difference in gun sales and the Olympic events are randomly timed with respect to interest in purchasing firearms, we could attribute that difference to the Olympics (these would be assumptions underpinning the analysis—more on this later).
Gun Sales in Summer Olympic vs. Non-Summer Olympic Years
Below is a plot of the FBI’s NICS background check data, showing the number of monthly background checks run across the country from 1999 to 2024; years with summer Olympic Games are in color, with other years in gray (including 2024, with its incomplete data).
The summer Olympic years don’t particularly stand out from the other years, and they follow the same seasonal trends. Looking at the 2016 summer games—the most recent games before this one that was not impacted by a global pandemic—and the two surrounding years, we see that gun sales followed a similar pattern.
So it didn’t appear that there were substantial increases in gun sales after the summer Olympics. While there’s still a decent chance some small number of people who watched shooting sports were inspired to take up a new sport (or simply purchase a new firearm), there’s several possible explanations why we wouldn’t see any measurable effect. First, while there may be a handful of people inspired to take up sport shooting and buy a new firearm because of the Olympics, their numbers may be so small relative to typical levels of firearm purchases as to not be detectable. Second, those inspired to start sport shooting may already own a firearm and not need to purchase a new one. Third, the pistol shooting event (that Kim and Dikeç competed in) uses an air pistol, which doesn’t require a background check to purchase, so if there was an increase in purchase of these guns, we wouldn’t know about it using FBI data.
What if we had seen a difference in gun sales after Summer Olympics?
Let’s pretend for a moment that we had actually seen the summer Olympic years have higher levels of firearm sales following the games, toward the end of the summer and fall months. In order to attribute those sales to interest from the Olympics, we’d have to assume that there was nothing else happening in those same years that might drive gun sales. If that was the case, then we would have trouble determining whether that increase was due to the Olympics or that other factor.
The summer Olympics have taken place every four years, going back from 2024, to 2020, 2016, 2012, 2008, etc. If those years ring a bell, it’s probably because they’re also the U.S. presidential election years. And as we mentioned earlier, presidential elections have been shown to drive gun sales. Because presidential election years are exactly correlated with summer Olympic years, if we had seen a difference in gun sales these years, we wouldn’t know whether it was because of the election, or because of the Olympics—or some combination of both.
In fact, even though in reality we didn’t see any appreciable difference between the Olympic and other years, it’s possible that there is both an Olympic and an election effect on gun sales that cancel each other out—one that increases and one that decreases sales. This seems pretty unlikely, but it’s possible. More likely, we’d guess the most likely scenario is that neither the average summer Olympic Games nor the average presidential election (at least, in the years we looked at) don’t markedly drive gun sales.